Kathryn Knight Sonntag

Labor 

When the body 
fills with tiny hooves
pressing in the early hours
before dawn (some

prodding softest flowers)
reverberations
of past lives cities open doors

mourn the already
granulated shadows
of a new dawn—Christmas crowning—
the first news of chains
broken

(Flanks flash white celestial blue
primordial waves press
my womb)

the way out they say is through
never breaching
the cold earth the kingdom never
over the next horizon

We clan of mothers remember
the light parted the shells dashed the
pearl
drawn out
from still-clattering chambers
of the deepest sweetest
twists of tissue There

is the Mother on bended knee
in the great mind of the body
spurring the horses on
and on and on

Woman Like a Wolf

There are three conditions
in which wolves kill excessively.
With rabies or distemper,

or when the rhythm of cyclic knowing
halts its massive cogs, extending
a winter’s reign that strands deer and wolf alike
in mounding snowfall.

When thaw finally breaks famine,
the deer, the hyperbolic treasure
exalted in the wolves’ memory, flee
for the next life while the pursuing pack
splits the forest in a blinding sheen,
pouring teeth into the deers’ frenzied flanks.

Light spills into their bellies. The alpha
female bares fangs at her cubs.
Into blossoming pink snow, possession’s
immeasurable consequence. Crimson drops
glisten down their legs,
springloaded.

The Center

When the time is right, the deep
nudging, that obscure shadow
will pull you in ways exact from sorrow
to longing for the ineffable landscape,
to that open field just over
the last horizon.

After the long journey 
what you always hoped for—the deepest
cavern of mind with those treasures unnamed 
and inescapable—resides here
at the central point of the clearing.

You know it: the axis of absolute reality.

It pulls and repels
as you circle—dusk to dawn—
until you understand its many iterations:
a pillar of light, a totem of ancestors,
a tree forever ascending.

When you stop orbiting
(if you ever do) do you
approach the deep humming
or do you retreat?

If you climb to the top and partake of its fruit
are you consumed? Turned
into something else altogether,
the alchemy complete?

Is our journey here, after all,
to return us to the navel we left,
plant our souls in the center and become
another center?

Interchanging auditorium
and stage
in the cosmic odeum of beholding
and being beheld?

And finally you must discern
the robed figure beside you
in the periphery of stars, whose stirrings
you take on as your own.

The Older Covenant 

The Gospel of Philip

Job 38:33-36

Take me back
before the broken tablets,
back to the secrets of winds
unfurled, constellations rising
in a new horizon, mud
and branch called by name.

I know of the Tree, good
and evil swirling 
in its fruit, alive
before the lesser law
became our golden calf.

Lady Wisdom wanders,
knows too well
that nothing transgresses
its appointed order
but we.

Take me back
to the pattern of the heavens
sewn into the lining
of Her dress.

Give me the wisdom
of the ant, she who
needs no instruction
on how to gather 
and harvest, on the true
measure of her
creation.

Grant me a gaze
into the Holy 
of Holies that I may know
the paths of everything
that lives.